String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2 / String Trio, Op. 1 (original published version)

String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2 / String Trio, Op. 1 (original published version) Naxos 8.572903

Though Miklós Rózsa became one of the most admired of film composers, he had always written music in other forms and his two published string quartets reveal important facets of his musical background. String Quartet No 1 was written in 1950 when he was under contract with M-G-M and, with its nocturnal and folk-dance imagery, is redolent of his Hungarian youth. String Quartet No 2 is prophetic of his later sparer style, though it too is infused with great energy and high drama. The String Trio, Op 1, recorded for the first time in its original 1929 published version, abounds with youthful vitality.

Review:
Now more popularly remembered as a composer of film scores, Miklos Rozsa’s musical life started at the early age of seven as a prodigy composer and violinist. Built into his contract with the MGM film company was a three month break in each year to further his ‘serious’ composing, and it was in those periods that both of his quartets were written. The first dated from 1950, its content placing it in mainstream tonal works of the time that flirted with atonality. With his native Hungarian influences ever present, it is a score redolent in easily assimilated thematic material, and shows his mastery of the quartet idiom and the juxtaposition of instrumental sonorities. It was to be thirty-one years later that he returned to the idiom…the whole work is so instantly enjoyable. The disc is completed by the String Trio composed when he was twenty and still at the Leipzig Conservatory. The young British group, the Tippett Quartet, play with passion and tremendous commitment, and the sound quality is the best chamber music disc I have heard from Naxos.
David Denton, David’s Review Cor­ner